


Crooked

by Celesma



Series: A Quantum of Solace [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Castiel Is Not Defective, Hurt Sam, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, POV Castiel, Pre-Slash, Shrinking, Tiny!Sam
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-05
Updated: 2016-06-05
Packaged: 2018-06-09 02:04:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6884824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Celesma/pseuds/Celesma
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Castiel has always been crooked.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Crooked

**Author's Note:**

> A timestamp between Chapters Six and Seven of A Quantum of Solace, primarily capturing Castiel's point of view. Castiel grapples with his feelings for Sam, as well as Zachariah's revelation that he's a "broken" angel. 
> 
> This is written a bit more sensuously than Quantum was, so I have given it an M rating.

_Castiel's Grace spreads over the wilderness like the sky. It is harsh and cloudless, the sun no less dominating for its distance of several million miles as it mercilessly bakes the land; even the wind scattering from his wings feels dry and dusty. Unbound by a vessel, he allows them to extend to their fullest length, his serpentine body unwinding like smoke and his grip loosening around the blade he had earned the right to wield not so long ago. Birds of prey make sounds of alarm and flee from him, disturbed even by the shadow of his partially cloaked form._

_He does not often descend from the lofty places of the earth to monitor human activity, not without explicit orders. But today Castiel enjoys a reprieve from the endless battles, and he wishes to watch the mortals, moving through their little towns of mud and brick, completely unaware of the cosmic struggle being undertaken on their behalf. Here in Beersheba, however, there are no living things to spy upon: none save for the two small humans, a woman and her child, struggling to make their way through the arid desert sands._

_The woman is Hagar of Egypt. She had displeased her mistress—Sarah wife of Abraham, the one favored by God to beget His chosen people—and now she and her son have been banished to wander the wilderness. Castiel knows they will find no shelter from the sun, which leaves the desert cracked and bare; the child is too weak even to walk on his own two feet anymore, and he drops to his knees more than once in the dust of the ground. They will not last much longer._

_Her skins depleted of water, the woman sits down hard and begins to weep._

_Castiel is moving even before he is aware of it. The shadow of his wings falls over her, annihilating the sun's cruel incursion. Hagar's eyes fill with terror and she clutches her child closer to her. But before he can utter the usual greeting— **do not fear—** they suddenly clear and she is smiling up at him, as if she knows him; knows that he will not harm her, although he can't imagine how she might have come to such a conclusion. Angels are fierce and awful in their appearance, and humans have long held them in terrified regard._

_He speaks softly to her, and to the child. They will not die here. Nor will their line; God has plans yet to make a great nation of them. The boy is awed and wants to touch his wing. Hagar tells him not to be silly, he'll get burned. Castiel opens her eyes and she sees the spring, a gushing fountain of water good for drinking and bathing._

_When at last he departs, pleased to see Hagar and her child drinking deeply of the spring, the color restored to their thin pale faces, he senses a familiar presence settle in at his side. He speaks without turning._

_"Anael."_    
  
_Anna spares no time for pleasantries or song. "Why did you do that?" she asks. "Her son's not the heir. He's not even close to being the heir. No children will come of that line."_  
  
_There is no inflection in his sister's voice as she speaks; there never is, in these days of war. And yet her words cut Castiel as deeply as if there had been. "He's just a bastard," she continues. "And she's just a slave."_  
  
_"I did not disobey."_  
  
_"But neither were you asked to save her—or worse, deliver false promises. Now our Father will have to see to the child's success, so that your words will not make a liar of Him."_  
  
_"The mother cried. She—" Castiel stops. "God heard her cry. He saw them."_  
  
_He had been absolutely certain of that. It was why he had spoken to her as he had, murmuring soothing songs of all the happy children her boy would father once he grew to manhood; hoping to bestow even a drop of water to a heart parched by despair. He is not so certain now, with Anna's reproach blazing hot against him, filling him with shame._  
  
_Anna can sense it. Now there is a hint of feeling in her voice: it is mourning. Her six wings rise to hide her face from him, as she delivers her judgment._  
  
_"You are crooked, brother."_

* * *

To sin, in human parlance, meant to miss the mark. The Greek _hamartia_ was originally an archery term, invoked when the athlete had fallen short of his goal. More than a mere error in judgment, however, sin was a violation of the spiritual law that governed all creatures; a selfish turning inward, an insult to the One who had made humans in His image. Angels—perhaps unsurprisingly—had their own word to convey this concept.  
  
An angel who could not follow orders was crooked.  
  
The Host predated human machines by several billion years, but they functioned in much the same way as one. Disobedience incurred the worst kind of shame—it was disobedience that had disrupted their finely tuned harmony, warped the beauty of the song passed down through the Triads since time immemorial, when Lucifer had first broken away from the joyful chorus of voices and countered with his own harsh, dissonant (and yet beautiful, strangely beautiful) melody: _Why ever should the sons of fire bow before the sons of clay?_  
  
Disobedient angels were always punished, if they were not killed first.  
  
It changed the quality of his companionship with his brother and sister. Gone were the days when they would slip away from their carefully but good-naturedly practiced drills, and the secret songs they shared as they wheeled through the stars. They were hastily—prematurely—deployed into a garrison, and it was there Anna proved her mettle as newly appointed captain of the seraph guard. She killed, and he killed, and Uriel killed. They were very good at killing: Fallen brother after Fallen sister fell beneath the flash-fire of their dancing blades. The First Triad vibrated with song after song, order after order after order, whipped into a frenzy of killing intent by the strength of its righteous rage.  
  
And then, one day, Anna was gone. And he was truly alone.

* * *

"Take your brother," were the first words he said to Dean, the moment they had absconded to the witch's house with Zachariah's victims. "Take him. I cannot—"  
  
Sam was covered in blood. Most of it was not his own, but the effect seemed to sap Dean of any impulse to be contrary. The older Winchester opened trembling hands and Castiel placed Sam in them, trying to ignore the pang of loss that sprang up in his heart as he did so.  
  
"Do not let me touch him again," he said.  
  
Dean stared at the angel, uncomprehending. Then his eyes darkened with rage, hiding a species of astonished hurt. "You bastard," he hissed. "Just because Sam—"  
  
"No," Castiel said. "I would never condemn him for that." And he explained—down to the last, gruesome detail—everything that had transpired. Dean never interrupted him. The older hunter's face was white and drawn when he had finished, and he unconsciously clutched his brother closer and stepped away, his feet catching on the bedroom's thick pile rug. Castiel did not blame him.  
  
_Your wings_ , an infinitesimal human voice wailed within him. He silenced it, not unkindly, and with reluctance it submitted to be enfolded once more in the coils of his wounded Grace. It would not do to debrief his vessel on his own injuries, not when Sam was still in so much peril.  
  
It was taboo for an angel to touch another's wings. That was an offensive tactic better left to the armies of hell. But then, Zachariah had already proven himself no better than a demon when he conspired to bring about the end of days—Castiel should have known what he would do.  
  
"I am sorry," he whispered, into the silence of Dean's disbelief. "I never meant to hurt Sam."  
  
For a long time Dean stared at him wordlessly, and then he shook his head, face pinched as if he were in pain. Castiel recognized the gesture, disappointment and resignation both in evidence in the sweep of his head on his neck; and the angel turned away, gaze tracking blankly across the living room, to the door of the occupied kitchen. "I just need him to be okay," the older hunter said. "Cas, Sammy was practically _swimming_ in that shit. How long until he's—"  
  
A thin howl split the air. It took Castiel a full second to recognize it as Sam's. The young hunter thrashed in his brother's grip, eyes wide and unseeing, fingernails biting into bloody palms, teeth gnashing together in terror from a spectre that haunted him in his own mind. It was impossible—impossible, and yet only right—that such a cry should seem to swallow up the entire world.  
  
"Cas!" The older hunter snapped his eyes up to meet the angel's, his expression nakedly helpless. But Castiel's attention was no longer on him; every vibration of his Grace was tuned towards that sound, longing to sing to it, to cover it and soothe it with songs older than the earth, until that anguished sound dropped away and fell to a slow, sweet hymn of joy. He wanted Sam's pain gone. The sensation was so alien, and yet so _familiar_ , that for a moment he felt that he had simply dropped out of his vessel, that he was nowhere anywhere in the vicinity of the cosmos that housed his Father's favored creation.  
  
Dean looked at him. He was resolved. "Take him," he ordered, and Castiel did not protest when Sam's familiar weight sank into his palm again.  
  
Castiel was a soldier. He was not a singer—not a singer any longer, at least—and not a comforter. He had shed the blood of the wicked and the innocent alike, and had learned not to mourn the distinction. But just as Hagar had wept and he had responded, so too was he helpless to do anything else in the face of Sam's suffering. He crumpled the boy to his chest, fingers spreading out over the tiny, quivering back, working infinitely small circles into the locked and panicked muscles. He hoped the touch would stir something in Sam, but the young hunter only continued to cry out, more wretchedly than before.  
  
On the cusp of despair, Castiel suddenly remembered a question Sam had once asked him. He found himself calling on that most unnatural of functions for angels, willing oxygen to flow through his borrowed lungs, praying that he was not disgracing himself even further in God's eyes.  
  
Breathing was like a song, he quickly came to realize. It had its own music, its own language; and presently he thought he understood it far better than human speech. A low hum poured like honey from his throat as new strength streamed in and out of his vessel; his palm rocked back and forth with each breath drawn through his nostrils and exhaled through his lips, like a dance made to match that silent song. Sam quieted by slow degrees, lulled by its imperfect, deceptive power. Then he turned over once and lay still. Castiel needed no reminder to be gentle as he placed his other hand on top of him, stroking a slow fingertip through his hair.  
  
Only when Sam was fully asleep again did he raise his eyes, return his attention to the rest of the world. Dean's gaze raked over him like lightning; there was something frightened, and relieved, and utterly devastated in his face. His features seem to shift before Castiel's sight, revealing the countenance that had looked upon him in his unveiled glory as he descended to the pit to save him: the face of one who thirsted for salvation and yet lived in screaming horror of it. Then his eyes grew dark and hooded. "Cas, I can't do this," he said in a voice far older than his years. "What... am I supposed to do, when he wakes up? I." He stopped, an utterly humorless laugh tumbling from his lips. "I've always taken care of him. But this... I don't know how to deal with this. I never have. I'm not good enough, for that. I'm not like..."  
  
Castiel did not know how he intended to finish that sentence. But the older Winchester seemed to have already decided that it didn't matter, and he threw Castiel another look before turning away with his shoulders squared, once more as guarded and inscrutable as a fortress.  
  
"Dean," Castiel said. He moved forward to reunite the brothers. But Dean shook his head.  
  
"Take 'em, Cas. He's gonna be jonesing for demon blood when he comes out of it. Someone's gotta wash all that shit off of him before he does."  
  
His look was pointed. "You... want me to bathe him?" Castiel was helpless to stop the words; they seemed to echo more from his Grace than from the warm cavity of his vessel's mouth, stripped of color and texture. He did not understand the reason for it; last night he would have been perfectly unconcerned by such a request.  
  
"Yeah. Did I stutter?" But Castiel was already shaking his head.  
  
"Sam does not want me to bathe him. He told me—it would not be—"  
  
"Sam adores you, you idiot." Dean's retort was as impatient as it was matter-of-fact, and inexplicably pained. "Whatever he said, it was probably only 'cause he's so worried about his goddamn virtue—"  
  
"I don't understand," Castiel said.  
  
"Do you ever?" But the anger in Dean's words faded as he looked into the angel's eyes. He sighed and pressed his fingers into his forehead as if a physical pain lingered inside it, although Castiel knew that none did. "Look, Cas, I'm not going to get on my knees and beg you. I'm asking you as a friend. I just... I need you to take care of Sammy for me. Just for a little while longer, just until he's okay. And then I can take over, and things can be—the way they're supposed to be again."  
  
And Castiel understood. For Dean Winchester, this _was_ begging.  
  
"All right," the angel whispered.

* * *

The bathroom was too small.  
  
In most respects, it was no different from the rest of the cottage in which Alana lived: well-kept, with enough religious imagery to give the suggestion of being cloistered within the walls of a modest abbey. There was no light switch. Instead there were candles of varying colors and sizes, arranged in a circle around the sink, each one alive with a gentle, undulating flame. Ornate carvings of crosses fashioned in the style of multiple Christian traditions—Celtic and Coptic and Catholic, among many others—hung from delicately twisting metal hooks above the room's single small, unremarkable mirror, along with icons that the angel recognized at a glance as Wiccan. A believer she may have been, but the witch clearly valued the pagan roots of her discipline. Some part of him felt that Sam would approve. Another, simpler part of him was confounded by the soaps and creams lining the edge of the cast-iron tub, of which there seemed to be a great deal. It recalled to his mind the moment Dean had gleefully shaken out the contents of a plastic bag filled with Sam's own hygiene products, convinced that the angel would find them unnatural or untoward simply because the older hunter did.  
  
He remembered then why he was here. Castiel gave himself over to yet another careful inspection of Sam, who had not stirred again since his nightmare. He hesitated for a long, uncertain moment. The shadow of his wings, whole but not unbroken, flickered mutely on the crosses clinging to the walls, giving them the shapes of branching fractals.  
  
It wasn't enough for Dean to give his permission. He needed to know that Sam would let him do this: that he would not be hurting the young hunter one iota more than he had already done in the last two days, and months before that. He touched gingerly at the helpless form with his thumb. For reasons yet unknown to him it was his thumb, more than any other finger of his hand, that Sam seemed naturally drawn towards. As hoped, Sam roused at the touch, came semi-awake with a dark lifting and dipping of lashes, his eyes peering out at nothing in particular. Like an infant predisposed to nurse, his left hand automatically rose and clutched the angel's thumb. Castiel forced himself to speak as softly as possible.  
  
"Your brother wants me to bathe you. Is that all right?" Sam's head cocked at him, like he didn't quite understand, but then he nodded slowly—even after everything Castiel had done to him, he still trusted him.  
  
"Yeah," he murmured. "Yeah, 'sokay." His grip became loose and boneless and he slid slowly back into the cleft of the angel's palm, strangely untroubled for the sheer amount of pain he must be in.  
  
What Castiel had told Sam yesterday held. He had seen humans unclothed countless times, bereft of their artificial ornamentation: as they were being born, as they were dying, as they were tangled up one within the other in the act of copulation. It was nothing, therefore, for him to remove Sam's blood-soaked clothes, to shed his shoes and socks between two light fingerpads, and then to shuck off his shirt and pants (although not the garments beneath those), letting them drift from his fingers onto the new and unfamiliar marble of the bathroom sink, where Dean would pick them up and have them cleaned to the best of his ability.  
  
Even so, his vessel's heart knocked against his ribs. His chest was filling with a strange pressure; as tremulous and pain-filled as the labored rhythm of Sam's own breathing. Castiel watched him, watched as the tiny shape did not start or shiver with cold but instead shifted position until it had achieved comfortable warmth in his palm, the body's fragile lines a perfect match to the lines of Jimmy's hand. One unoccupied forefinger— _his_ finger, Castiel realized with a start—made an exploratory brush of that small, small spine, and Sam arched his back towards it in response, a flower opening towards the sun. Castiel contemplated the tip of his finger, which had come away with a smear of demon blood.  
  
_You're so beautiful._ Those were Sam's words. Castiel had never felt less. He knew, better than most of his brethren, that beauty was reflected in the soul, not in outward appearance. And Castiel was crooked. Perhaps that was why he could not stop looking at Sam, newly unornamented, covered in blood, more vulnerable and laid bare than he had ever seen him, even after his nightmare, when he had been crying and pouring out the measure of his sin to Castiel. His soul shone with a moral purity brighter than most—a purity Castiel wished he could claim for himself. This was a boy who refused to become his sin. He had lost the battle—lost it with no help from him—but he had not lost the war.  
  
Jimmy was his friend. So was Dean.  
  
Sam, he thought with a lurch of unease, might be something else.  
  
The bathroom was warmer than before. Castiel felt hot beneath the heavy folds of his jacket. Yet he didn't dare put Sam down to adjust the contours of his coat, or strip it off entirely. Instead the angel let his hand drift south, until it was cresting the surface of the water. His fingers rearranged around Sam until the young hunter was sitting up with his back against them, bloody legs splayed on either side of him, insensate to the tide of water that washed over them, instantly draining the ribbons of red away into pools that dripped down the sides of his palm to splash into the basin of the sink.  
  
Castiel applied soap to his other hand: peach-scented. And he began to clean Sam.  
  
There was a lot of blood. It was chiefly in his hair and on his face, but the angel had determined to start with his body, to get that clean first. His soap-slicked fingers worked first into the curvature of muscle in his back, and then into the small spaces of his neck and shoulders, behind his ears, underneath his arms. He swiped a thumb up and down his chest and stomach, along the legs that had once been so long but now barely equaled half of his finger's length. Castiel felt better now. The prickle of heat inside him had retreated to a warmth that was nearly pleasant, all the different smells of the soaps and candles captivating his nostrils in a way he had never known until today, peach and vanilla and pumpkin and—barely, yet indelibly—Sam's own, natural scent. Sam was as pliable and soft in sleep as he was awake, and it felt good to hold him like this. Castiel wondered how much Grace he had lost today if he was that well-connected to the physical sensations of his vessel; less than an hour ago he'd almost been permanently, irrevocably ripped from the shelter of Jimmy's skin, and yet that memory was beginning to fade in the face of this new experience. Sam was nearly clean already, but he felt certain he could do this forever.  
  
Next, he reached for shampoo. Those had been Dean's terse instructions: soap, shampoo, rinse. His palm remained submerged in the sink. Sam skimmed over the water; he looked nearly like a swimmer on his back, his toes extended languorously, like he was just waiting for the sun to touch them instead of the soft play of candlelight. His skin gleamed with a wetness that the angel found inexplicably pleasing.  
  
Sam's hair was black with matted blood, but Castiel gave his Father silent thanks when he saw that the shampoo did its work well, restoring it to the natural beauty of its brown curls. Sam made a sleepy sound and presented his neck, allowing the angel to massage a thumbful of clove-scented shampoo into the lighter-colored wisps at the nape.

Abruptly, Castiel's wings ached. He ignored the pain, until he realized why.  
  
Sam's eyes were open. He was looking at him.  
  
_No._ Castiel ascertained it after a tense instant. Sam was looking, but not really seeing. The dew-glittered lashes rose and fell, rose and fell. His lips parted—to scream again or to mutter dream-nonsense, Castiel didn't know. But no sound came out and at length he closed them again, still staring dreamily up into the angel's face, like he was looking at a distant cloud and trying to identify the shape he saw there.  
  
Castiel wondered, suddenly, if that was something Sam did as a child—looked at clouds—and if even then he had seen angels winging through those strangely clumped masses of condensation. Because Sam looked so reverent now, and filled with wonder, and Castiel knew that Sam couldn't really see him—may not even remember this later. The young hunter lowered a hand and ran it over the line of Castiel's palm, which reacted to the tiny touch with a palpable shiver. His lips moved again as if in recognition, forming an inaudible word. _Cas._  
  
"I am almost done," Castiel said. Sam merely nodded, head unsteady on his neck. Then: _Cas_ , he repeated, and the phantom sound of his mouth saying his name—even a butchered human variant of it—made Castiel shudder again. He pressed his thumb to Sam's lips—the last step of the bathing, if one that he had deliberately delayed—and carefully, methodically wiped away the last traces of tainted blood, the blood that Sam had ingested in a moment of surrender, then harnessed to save his life.  
  
Castiel did not labor under the delusion that small things were insignificant. As an angel, he understood that time and space were largely relative—and therefore irrelevant—concepts. Jimmy contained his Grace with ease, and Sam had disposed of three demons using nothing more than his inborn ability, tempered by a herculean will. But he did not expect something as minuscule as the breath beating soft on his thumb to intensify the low throb in his pulse, to cause his wings to shiver and spread open at his back, briefly disturbing the understated ambiance of scent and heat and light. Confused thoughts surfaced, before being supplanted by less pleasant, yet more familiar ones. He heard Zachariah's voice, sneering.  
  
_Castiel has always been—special._  
  
_It got poor Anna so **confused** , trying to figure out your damage._  
  
_You are crooked, brother._  
  
Castiel closed his eyes. He was shaking. He could not do that. Not with such a fragile creature sitting quite literally in the palm of his hand. He must be strong for Sam, as Sam was for him. And yet—  
  
_My sister left because of me_ , a small, unangelic voice insisted. That same small voice that had howled inside him, the day it had been announced that she had deserted and was to be recaptured and executed for treason. _God wills as He wills,_ the soldiers around him sang in beautiful assent as the First Triad issued its orders, moving into their formations, and Castiel had never had the courage to scream what he had felt, nor the intelligence to even conceptualize the words: _This is wrong. This cannot be what He wants._  
  
And, later: _I'm sorry, Anna. It was because I was crooked. I was bad, and so you left me._  
  
His memories had grown distorted. There was too much missing time, too many lost impressions. He remembered grief, devastating in its power, and his wings unintentionally beating out a single discordant note that clashed against the symphony of his brothers and sisters as they fanned out across the stars. He remembered the first instant after it sounded: Uriel turning the first of his four faces to him, his eyes at once stricken with affront and heartsick understanding. And then—nothing. He had simply failed to matter, or vibrate, or be anything at all.  
  
When he came back into himself, he was assured of the facts.  
  
Anael was gone. And he would kill her if he found her.  
  
(He thanked God that he never found her. Until he did.)  
  
Was he the only one, then, to have had his memories stripped away? Uriel, Zachariah said, had also been punished after Sodom and Gomorrah, and yet he seemed to have no memory of it. His brother had always prized himself on the ability to reduce cities to churned earth and crumbling bones on his own strength. (He would not think of Anna— _would not—_ did. _Tell your commander I said hello._ If he hadn't feared so much for what would happen to Sam once he was gone, he gladly would have.)  
  
He felt his wings snapping taut in that small and claustrophobic space, straining with the pain of twin voids into which no light could intrude. Jimmy himself seemed suddenly too small to contain him. Castiel trembled, feeling it all over again, the moment Zachariah began to call him back to Heaven; the stark horror and the fear, the sense that he was leaving so much work undone, _Sam hurt_ , and he couldn't—he _couldn't—_  
  
Another beating of breath against his thumb, stilling him, tugging him gently back to earth, back into his vessel. _Cas._ "Nearly done," Castiel tried to say again, but the only sound to escape the tight column of his throat was a grateful sob. He dipped the fingers of his unoccupied hand into the water, let it drip in thin streams down the shining planes of Sam's body. He did this again and again, until Sam was completely clean, baptized in water and purity from the top of his dark head of hair to the glistening toes of his feet. Not for the first time, Castiel felt an involuntary breath slip from his lips as he beheld him. Sam Winchester—this tiny, humble, vulnerable boy who had taught him to appreciate the taste of pumpkin, a boy that was at once incredibly fragile and incredibly strong—he was the beautiful one.  
  
Not Castiel.  
  
He drew forth a small square of towel and wrapped it around Sam, bundling him carefully in the cloth layers. He only meant to let Sam rest for a while, to remain warm and dry while he saw to the rest of the house's defenses; but the tiny hunter reacted the moment he sensed that he was being left alone, shivering and struggling to break free of his bonds. Castiel knelt and closed his fingers around Sam, who instantly calmed at his touch, curling his body into a ball, much in the manner that he had the day Castiel had discovered him cursed, only now he was burrowing deeper into the angel's palm—seeking to be closer, not shrink away. _That was yesterday_ , the angel realized with a pause. It had seemed much longer ago.  
  
" _Olaoada gi londlasod canilu_ ," Castiel pronounced softly. That was what the other angels had called him— _boy with the demon blood—_ and it was the name he had learned to associate with Sam, long before he ever laid eyes on him. But that was not the right name for Sam. He thought he had a better one.  
  
He drew Sam up to his face, having succeeded in swaddling him once more in the cloth, and whispered it to him. " _Jarana saga_ ," he murmured reverently, watching as the breath of those words swept through his damp hair. _Little one_. Sam made a soft sound that could have been approval, his hazel eyes full. Castiel studied him for a long moment, satisfied that Sam was warm and content, and then he bent his head until he could no longer see Sam, until the only thing he knew of him were the soft wet strands of hair tickling his lips.  
  
He did not know what compelled him to do this a second time. He didn't even understand why he had done it the first time—only that Sam had been so ashamed, and he so proud, and he could not bear to see Sam cry. He had not been thinking clearly at the time. He was thinking even less clearly now. He was crooked and wrong, but Sam never made him feel that way. From the very first, he had been filled with childlike awe and respect, as opposed to the irascible Righteous Man Castiel had been charged with protecting, from whom respect had to be pried like a weapon out of his hands. Sam had always been pleasant, if distant. The angel understood now that the distance had been because he didn't feel he deserved the company of angels. Castiel wished he could make him understand how wrong he was.  
  
An instant after initiating the contact he prepared to pull away—he had presumed upon Sam's space too much already—but then he felt tiny fingers crest along the surface of his lips, curious and questing; and that simple touch was enough to keep him anchored there, helpless as a flightless bird. It was the hand that had removed an errant crumb from Castiel's cheek, in a college town coffee shop. The memory made him smile softly, and he felt the quality of Sam's grip change. It was incredibly relaxed, fingers spreading out to touch, explore; no longer hesitant, as before, but possessed of easy confidence and trust. Sam smelled of peaches, and of something more than peaches. Castiel felt his wings arch away from him, as if pulled by invisible threads.  
  
"You're soft, Cas," Sam murmured after a long moment, his sleepy voice nevertheless filled with pleased wonder.  
  
Castiel said nothing. He held himself very still, expecting that Sam, having made his judgment, would now lie down in his palm and go to sleep. But instead the young hunter sighed and dropped his head against him. The wet tumble of his hair spilled lazily over his mouth, eyelashes fluttering open and closed; those motions, so diminutive and yet so enthralling, caused the angel's lips to sever open with surprise—and within a moment he had felt it, tiny breaths hushing against his teeth, a small cheek nuzzling deeper into soft flesh, setting his Grace on fire deep inside him. For an instant his thoughts were ablaze with panic; he did not know what to do.  
  
And then he did what came naturally to him—him, an angel that was so unnatural. He pressed two fingertips to Sam's toweled back, and he drew him closer, pretending that the breath slipping from the young hunter's lips was his own, that the impossibly small heart pulsing against him beat within his own, much larger chest. Again Sam sighed and shifted against him, limbs unfolding with the ease that came with deep contentment. Castiel closed his eyes, losing himself in Sam. It was a moment that would not last—the demon blood would find Sam again, sooner rather than later—but the angel would remember it for the rest of his life.  
  
One moment, then. One moment with Sam, to feel the things he wanted to feel. And after that, they would rest.

**Author's Note:**

> The word "crooked" is a bit of terminology that I shamelessly adapted from C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy -- in those books, the Fallen angels are "bent" from God's original purpose for them. I thought it would be cool if the angels in SPN had their own special word to describe one who's strayed from their sacred path. 
> 
> The story of Hagar can be found in Chapter 21 of the Book of Genesis. Lucifer's line to the Host comes from an extrabiblical story that explains why he chose to disobey God. 
> 
> Once again, all credit for the Enochian phrasing goes to the awesome [SLWalker](http://archiveofourown.org/users/SLWalker/pseuds/SLWalker) and their [Enochian Resource](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6286417/chapters/14404726).


End file.
